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April Reading List

Here’s what I read this month:

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins – Yep. I gave in. The book was better than the movie, but I liked the movie pretty well. No. It isn’t a high-level, hyper-literary book. It doesn’t have to be. The plot is straightforward, but interesting. The characters are sympathetic. The world of the novel is full of intrigue. I’ll be reading the other two books of the trilogy in the coming months. (I promised I’d pace myself, not get too wrapped up in the Hunger Games world.)

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann – This is another classic. Nearly 1,000 pages of the story of a young German who goes to spend three weeks visiting a cousin who is living in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Alps and finds out he, too, must make a long-term stay of his own. The “Everyman’s Library” version of the book features the John E. Woods translation, considered to be the superior version of Mann’s novel.

Cataclysm Baby, by Matt Bell – Twenty-six flash fiction stories, one named for each letter of the alphabet in the format of a baby name book, each story telling the post-apocalyptic tale of a world that can’t be our own, unless of course it one day becomes our own.

You, One a Good Day, by Aletha Black – Only one story from One Story this month. You, On a Good Day is a second person, short fiction piece (rare, indeed) about what you would, or wouldn’t, do, to prove that you are a good person, on a good day, in contrast to those things the narrator might do in her own weakness.

FictionQuarterly – Four-hundred pages of new short stories.

Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle both had new issues that came out in the second half of April. Be sure to look for them.

You can find the reading list for the first quarter of 2012 at these links: January, February, and March.